About

“You Keep Using That Word, I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means” is a phrase used to call out someone else’s incorrect use of a word or phrase during online conversations. It is typically iterated as an image macro series featuring the fictional character Inigo Montoya from the 1987 romantic comedy film The Princess Bride.

Origin

The quote “You keep using that word, I do not think it means what you think it means” was said by American actor Mandy Patinkin[2] who portrayed the swordsman Inigo Montoya[3] in the 1987 romantic comedy The Princess Bride.[1] Throughout the movie, Sicilian boss Vizzini (portrayed by Wallace Shawn[4]) repeatedly describes the unfolding events as “inconceivable.” After Vizzini attempts to cut a rope the Dread Pirate Roberts is climbing up, he yells out that it was inconceivable that the pirate did not fall. To this, Montoya replied with the quote:

The clip of the scene from Princess Bride was uploaded via YouTube channel Bagheadclips on February 4th, 2007. Since its upload, the video has been used in the comments of Reddit posts as early as since January 2008[20] and has gained more than 644,000 views as of July 2012.

Spread

Though the quote had been used to refute posters on 4chan[17] as early as March 2010, the first advice animal style image macro with the quote over a still photo of Mandy Patinkin as the character was shared on the advice animals subreddit[8] on June 18th, 2011. The caption used the word “decimate” as the example of what was being misused. While the word is defined as “to kill, destroy, or remove a large percentage of”[9], it was originally used in the Roman era[10] to refer to a punishment in which 1 in 10 men were killed. The misuse of the word to mean anything more than ten percent has been blogged about on Listverse[11], personal blog World Wide Words[12] and WikiHow.[13]

More instances of the image macro have appeared on other subreddits including /r/RonPaul[14] and /r/Anarcho_Capitalism.[15] As of July 2012, the Quickmeme[5] page has 640 submissions and the Memegenerator[6]page has more than 1800 submissions. Additional instances are posted on Memebase[18], Reddit[16] and Tumblr[7]with the tag “I do not think it means what you think it means.”